“I remember making it like it was yesterday,” says Simone Rocha of a spider dress that was an early homage to the artist Louise Bourgeois that featured in her BA collection. “I got so obsessed with it. It was all crocheted lurex doilies. I was painstakingly cutting 2 cm strips of latex into a yarn and working that in. It was a pattern-cutting nightmare,” she recalls, smiling in her London studio. Wearing a gingham dress of her own design, a hefty rope silver chain and a cream bow perched in her dark hair, Rocha is breaking from spring 2024 fittings to talk about her part in a new exhibition “Echo. Wrapped in Memory” at MoMu in Antwerp which puts her work alongside that of Bourgeois and the avant-garde choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in what is set to be a fascinating exploration of fashion and memories.
Bourgeois’s own connections to clothing, textiles, and fashion are many. She grew up amid tapestry restoration in Paris; she put clothes, often her own, in her sculpture; she even became friends with Helmut Lang, appearing in his ad campaigns. “Fashion is like the weather, the ocean - it changes all the time,” she said. She also spoke of how garments hold memories of people and places and are “an exercise in memory” or “like signposts in the search for the past.” De Keersmaeker, meanwhile, has repeatedly collaborated with Dries Van Noten—he designed clothing for a reprisal of her piece “Rain” in 2017 at London’s Sadlers Wells, while De Keersmaeker herself appeared in the designer’s fall 2021 collection, inspired by the designer’s own love of dance.
“The three of them share a certain sensibility. What they create comes from a personal place,” says curator Elisa De Wyngaert. “Everything in the show is about different identities, being an artist, a mother, a daughter, a woman, a person in the world. The way these women see the beauty in garments that are not perfect and the way memories can be interwoven with our experiences.” In the exhibition, de Wyngaert has drawn together works by all three women alongside complementary pieces from the likes of Billie Zangewa, Harley Weir, and Maya Barrera. There will also be childhood drawings by designers, including a sketch by Martin Margiela of his grandmother who was a key influence in him becoming a designer. “He wrote to me and said that after he did his first fashion show she [his grandmother] came backstage and said, ‘oh Martin what a great success doing everything I told you not to do’,” laughs de Wyngaert.
Blue Days from 1996 by Bourgeois will be on show in Europe for the first time. Twenty looks from across Rocha’s career will also be displayed as tableaux alongside new films created by De Keersmaeker’s company Rosas that will illustrate the way her choreographies are linked to the costumes; it will also mark the first time the choreographer has spoken publicly about clothing in her work. “Clothing is crucial to De Keersmaeker. Like both Bourgeois and Rocha, she is very precise about all the garments she uses in her performances, ” says de Wyngaert. “The garments and the dance moves are very much informed by memories, from her childhood and the clothing her parents used to wear or she used to wear as a child.”
Drawing together personal, intimate, and often domestic stories around clothing is something that de Wyngaert feels has often been overlooked in exhibitions and books. She was keen to focus on how garments play a key role in the experience of life. Rocha has made collections inspired by her experiences of motherhood while Bourgeois imbued much of her work with ideas around her own mother, represented as the spider, always repairing and restoring, and then her own experiences of having three sons. “I felt really at home in dad’s studio,” Rocha recalls of her own childhood growing up amid her parents running the John Rocha label. “My mum and dad always worked together and built his label together. My early memories are in his studio, even as a kid I loved the pearls, all the garment bags, the smell.” Rocha recounts how she would climb in and out of the rolls of fabric in the fabric room, a visual that chimes with Bourgeois’s own childhood of hiding under the table or playing in rolled up carpets. Here, Rocha shares more about her process and memories, and how they’re interwoven.
How were the clothes selected for the show?
There is quite a broad body of work but a lot of the pieces are very hand-labored and hand-worked and I thought that was nice to show. Originally, the main choices were from fall 2015 which had pieces that are really influenced by Bourgeois’s tapestry heads, and I love that idea as the head is where you hold your memories. Then also the pieces I had made in collaboration with Bourgeois and the Easton Foundation were really important [fall 2019].
But actually, MoMu were interested in pieces that were also personal to me. There is the pregnant collection of spring 2022—which I call Baby Teeth—and they wanted to include looks from that which are inspired by my own memories. It was after my second daughter Noah Roses was born, I was in the thick of insomnia, a heightened emotional reality which I tried to work through but was challenging. I couldn’t breastfeed my first daughter but I could breastfeed my second daughter so I was really interested in doing something about the nursing bra and integrating that into the garments because it is something that is hidden, but also it’s the idea of nurturing. We ended up embellishing them and adorning them and almost treating them like crown jewels! As a garment they’re framing something so intimate, something that is essentially giving life.
When you’re working on a new collection are you always drawing from your own past, your own memories to realize the clothing?
Well, I technically do one on, one off, for my own sanity. It was never intentional but that is how it has worked for the past decade. It might be a collection based around giving birth or being heavily pregnant. The kinds of things that are physically happening to me that I can’t ignore and become a part of the process.
Usually after a show like that I feel incredibly exposed and even though in one way it’s cathartic, it’s exhausting. Then historically the next show will brew from an external idea. Fall 2023, for example, was exploring Lughnasadh [the Irish Harvest Festival] which is obviously connected to my past. Being Irish, I was looking into Irish rituals, courting and courtships, but it wasn’t so me and my debs [laughs].
What do you think this exhibition might reveal about you as a designer that we might not know about you? Any Simone surprises?
Actually, what is interesting, and a lot of the pieces are being sent to Antwerp today, so they’ve come out of the archive and are in the studio and they’re really colorful! [Simone pauses, comically]. I’m quite emo by nature [laughs]. Every collection starts for me in black and white and then I highlight colors, but it was interesting that all the pieces that have been selected—between us and MoMu—there is an amazing clashing collection of colors, some are really faded, some are really bright. That for me feels like a different output than my usual output show-wise. I think that might be a bit of a surprise.
What’s it like seeing your own work in a museum? Unreal. There’s two huge compliments. Someone you don’t know and seeing them wearing your clothes in the street, living their lives. And then seeing your clothing in an exhibition, whether they’re alongside historical garments. Or like when I was featured in the Met exhibition “Manus × Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology” with a lacquered black dress from spring 2012, so from really, really early on in my career, and I ended up beside a Cristobal Balenciaga black lace dress. ‘I was like, wow.’ That is the ultimate compliment.
Never did I think that is where my work would be when I was crocheting in a corner and then going to the pub with all my friends [laughs]. Being invited to do Lismore Castle [Rocha curated an exhibition in 2022] to put together “Girls Girls Girls” and now being invited to do this with MoMu, it is amazing because I love my work and I love my job and I feel very fortunate. Even though some days it can be incredibly difficult, I enjoy it. I feel like I am doing what I should be doing. It’s also tricky because the brand is my name and the brand is a beast so it’s really nice to have projects that are unrelated to manufacturing garments and that expand your mind.
But you don’t see your own fashion work as art?
I’ve always believed that they’re very different. I’ve always believed that fashion is design and fashion is not art. Personally, the thing I love about fashion is that there is a practicality to it and physicality to it because you wear it and I think that is what changes it from art. I did my thesis on that. It was all around Louise Bourgeois and looking at her latex sculptured bulbous pieces that she was wearing and asking ‘is this fashion? Is this art? But no, she is wearing her art. As much as I loved when I was in college the iconic Yohji Yamamoto and Nick Knight photography silhouette with the red bustle or the imagery of Comme des Garçons and Paolo Roversi, I never felt that they were art. I always felt they were fashionable. I’ve never felt like I was an artist. I feel like I’m a designer.
What are your own first clothing memories?
There are two things that resonate. A brown soft nappa leather jacket that was a bit like a parka with a mustard paisley that I think my dad made. I was around five or six. It was worn by my half-sister, myself, and then my brother. The pieces I really remember are the pieces that were passed down and that particular leather jacket, I think because I saw it on someone older there was a desire and having it yourself, there was an affirmation. Then passing it on and seeing it on someone else. There was also a navy cardigan with loads of bugle beads that my sister had that then was passed down. I think there is an understanding that somebody else has given it a personality, but then what does your personality do to it? And then it goes on. It was these things that I recall from childhood rather than seeing something in a shop and wanting it.
What would you like people to feel when they leave this show? What emotions?
I hope people feel very powerful. What is really nice is that it is essentially around memory and femininity but it is in no way about fragility.
“Echo. Wrapped in Memory” runs at MoMu in Antwerp from October 14 through February 25, 2024.